16 January 2006

Back from Las Vegas, I was wondering whether I should put up the footage of the keynotes I filmed. They were public performances, in front of tons of journalists, photographers, and cameras. Now that I spotted that videos of keynotes were up on cnet’s news.com, I guess there’s no reason not to publish my own footage (I'll take it down of coruse if I'm given a good reason to do so).

01 December 2005

My problems with Skype are not over: I run the latest version on my laptop (winXP), on my desktop (winXP), and my Mac (OS X). The application randomly freezes (I need to kill the process), does not display incoming chats, directs callers to my voicemail instead of ringing, starts dropping packets during a call, breaks up calls, etc.

Guys – I’m on a 16Mbps broadband connection. And I’ve checked most settings, and reinstalled some of the machines. The service is not working as it used to! Is it the threshold of 4m users online at a given time giving you trouble ? On my last post, the Skype engineers were kind enough to send me a couple of apps to debug Skype on my side. Great, but it’s only for one case, when it freezes. I’m having so many problems, that Ivan (in Madrid) and I (in Paris) have gone back to oerv-charged & ultra-expensive regular phone calls. By the way he’s having the same issues on his machines in Madrid as well.

So I’ve downloaded the Gizmo project, and will be giving it a try in the next couple of days, for a switch of service. Too bad Skype: I loved your service, but I have a business to run, and people to talk to all the time. Can’t wait for you to fix stuff

26 November 2005

It's been years that I've been looking for an easy way and*perfect* way to take notes and keep track of all my ideas.

In no particular order:

I've tried taking notes on my laptop in notepad: I have tons of .txt files that I never open up, because they tend to cluster my desktop and I cannot search all of them at once, nor easily track the dates.

I’ve tried using a wiki: kind of works because you can share it easily with other people: the formatting is kinda weird, but it works. You need to be online though. (any solution for local and server-side wikis out there ? reminds me of Lotus Notes doesn’t it ? and the new efforts by Ray Ozzie with the newly announced SSE.

Of course I’ve used stacks of A4 paper: not pratical to keep in one place

I’ve tried notepads (been using that in the last 2 weeks), and I keep telling myself that I need to put them on a digital document at some point

I’ve tried speciliased paper organizers with special to-do lists: great, but not serachable. So I keep in a lot of stuff, with no priorities in the end.

So, here I found on the download squad this little program called EverNote. Waow: it solves all of the above problems: it keeps track of all your notes + multimedia notes + links to the web + searchable by category, by date, etc. and in its basic version (enough for me as I don’t need handwriting recognition) it’s FREE. I guess Microsoft’s OneNote works the same way ? never tried it.

So here you go: tip of the day, is to use this little program to manage all your notes taking. i’m interested in your feedback, a comparison with OneNote and above all, whether there is a way to publish this content to a group (ie. a wiki approach).

Update: there's an extension for Thunderbird and Firefox that allows you to post directly. It's available here. It's already included for IE (thanks P. in the comments section)

21 November 2005

I was trying to see this article on digg.com… So is Google filtering out content according to territories ?

By the way, if you don’t know digg, Wired has a recent story on its genesis, with diggnation co-host Kevin Rose being of course the founder. check this quote: “ Rose had built a strong following, and his TV fans followed him to several new ventures after he and some former broadcast colleagues formed a company, Revision3 Studios, to produce technology-centric video podcasts. ” Seeing any trend here ???

Digg.com is different although in my opinion more addictive than del.icio.us. Although if you are vicious enough, diggdot.us will combine all 3 services of digg.com, slashdot and del.icio.us into one place!

18 November 2005

Folks, we had a tremendous time at the first edition of LesBlogs earlier this year. Loic has assembled now again at LesBlogs 2 a fantastic list of panelists to come and talk to us about Web 2.0, blogging, podcasting, videoblogging vpodcasting , and all the latest trends in the net economy. You have to be there if you are interested in this space!

21 October 2005

Just hung up from a pretty amazing tool: FlashMeeting. It allows you to setup a conference using audio and video among many people (we were up to 18 people from the French vlogging list on the same conference room) using a simple webcam. Everyone takes turns to talk (the system manages a queue) and it’s very intuitive to use. Also included are a chat room and a whole video log of all the conversations ( a bit like a camtasia file).

No need to set up Festoon anymore on every computer, since it works great just with a Flash player on your browser. I am more and more amazed at all the A/V capabilities that Flash is bringing.

And… it’s free for the moment. From their FAQ:

I'm interested but how much does it cost?Nothing at the moment... It is an on-going research project and as long as you don't mind the content and use of the room being used for our research, and from time-to-time answering questions about your experience using FlashMeeting, for the time being it is free to use. An ideal user group would be a community from the educational or business 'world' that work apart but would benefit from regular contact using FlashMeeting. You need to apply for access to the FlashMeeting booking server.

24 September 2005

“ How come that there is still no VC money behind the BitTorrent project (downloads here)? I truly believe that it has an enormous potential to disrupt the Internet and traditional streaming business models as much as Napster in its time or Skype nowadays. ”